Chapter 14 - Tomorrow's business world

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Tomorrow's business world	475

   On the other side of the world Malaysian-born chartered accountant Peter Ho, now based in Auckland, New Zealand, and former diamond-drilling expert Colin Burr, now based in Adelaide, Australia, have designed an accelerated-learning course entitled Accounting is Ezy, which is successfully teaching the principles of accountancy to non-accountants in two days.
   Smart entrepreneurs are also applying their talents to financing the electronic revolution in schools. Bill Gates, in his latest book, Business @ The Speed Of Thought, highlights the example of Bruce Dixon, a Melbourne, Australia, school teacher with the core of a financing idea. Writes Gates: "Out of many discussions, conferences, and brainstorming with teaching colleagues emerged the radical idea of having all the students finance their own machine. Dixon, by then a technology consultant to schools, worked out a financial model. For a monthly fee, students lease a machine and software; the vendor provides maintenance and upgrades; and when the student graduates the family keeps the machine."

Selling services and training with your products
 
  More and more major companies are also finding that their path to the future lies in adding new services - often high quality training - to their traditional role as manufacturers or retailers.
   Probably the most dramatic example is the world's second most valuable company:* America's General Electric Co. Its market worth at the end of 1998: $360 billion. Its 1998 turnover: more than $100 billion. Profits: $9.3 billion.
   For years a leader in manufacturing, GE "can no longer prosper selling manufacturing goods alone".8 Says Chief Executive Jack Welch: "Our job is to sell more than just the box."
   The Welch formula is based firmly on several key trends highlighted in chapter one of this book: from the service society to the global economy. In 1995, GE's international revenues soared to $27 billion. The most spectacular gains both inside North America and around the globe have been made in linking superb servicing to manufacturing.

* In The Fortune 500, released in April 1999, Microsoft topped GE as the company with the world's highest market value: $418 billion. Early in 1999 Microsoft reorganized itself into eight separate groups: each one to concentrate on servicing different customers.

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